I originally posted this to the Intermediate forum but then, after getting no reply for 24 hours (except a spammer hawking golf clubs), decided this is a question about an advanced technique. So, with a couple of appropriate edits, I am re-posting it here.

With the help of several people on the Intermediate forum, I successfully created a useful, if limited class. However, it is not CPANT-worthy. In the process of working on that latter issue, I have written a couple of methods, named identically to the attributes on which they operate. They are:

$object->in_delim()

$object->out_delim()

In each case, if the user supplied a parameter, the method sets the attribute to that value. In either case, it returns the value in there. Hence, this would be called an accessor-mutator. At least that's what Sam Tregar calls it in his excellent book Writing Perl Modules for CPAN (2002 edition). Since the code is identical for both methods, except for the name of the attribute and its method, I mimicked code from page 86 of that book, placed right after the package definition: